Canandaigua schools start work on strategic plan

CANANDAIGUA – "I would like as many voices as possible involved in this process," Jeannie Grimm, president of the Canandaigua Board of Education, said Tuesday morning.

Her enthusiasm for the school district’s next big challenge — a new three- or five-year strategic plan — is infectious.

On Saturday, Canandaigua’s District Planning Team (DPT), a group of 70 people who are prepared to qualify and quantify the future of the city schools, began their work with a two-hour "community vision summit."

"We envisioned what we want our school district to be," Grimm said. Once everybody got the charge, the 70 split into groups and after two hours of work, "each group came up with a list of 10-12 key words."

On Wednesday, a writing team took the "power words" and ideas raised in the visioning session and wrote a draft mission and vision. That document will be presented at the strategic planning committee meeting next Tuesday.

What all this is leading up to is a document that will guide every activity and endeavor in the district for three to five years. When everyone is on the same page, this is the page they’ll be looking at.

The district is using the services of the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester, with Dr. Henry "Harv" Peris as the chief consultant, to lead the process.

The district’s five-year "Plan for Excellence," Grimm admitted, "had ceased to become a living document. No one had used it anymore. It was created under a different superintendent."

She said the new strategic plan will be "a very detailed road map for the school district, a living document that all decisions come out of. This is something big and 21st century-oriented, something appropriate for students and faculty and staff to grow toward and dream about and the details to get there."

Next Tuesday’s meeting will review the present mission statement and either keep it, modify it or write a new one.

Community Focus Groups will be enjoined Oct. 24-25, and data from them will guide the next steps. The school board is expected to approve the final mission and vision in January. There will be a series of surveys online in which people can participate. As the data comes in, each principal and administrator in the district will develop up to four initiatives to align with the new strategic plan — who’s responsible, what outcome is projected, and when will it be delivered.

In April, the entire plan will be presented to the board, which will move to adopt or modify it on May 22.

Grimm said people will be able to follow what’s happening on the district website. She is hoping for lots of community involvement, and the district is prepared to reach out for comment from everyone with a stake in the schools and ask people to describe what they think the school district should look like — from facilities to student activities to athletics: "Every aspect of the schools, including our community partnerships," she said.

Page 2 of 2 - She said the idea was to draw out opinions, "not to plant any ideas."

"We want everybody in this conversation," she said. "We want to hear from the end users, the individual person who has an opinion of our schools."

Grimm said the district would take input "any way we can get it" — letters, emails, calls to board members and the superintendent, and other avenues. "We want full participation by every kind of person in our school district," she said — students, parents, businesses, property owners and more.

"This is important," she said. "Public education is the single greatest American invention; the greatest path to social equity."